“Pardner, what drives you into the desert?”

“Do I seem to be a driven man?”

“No.  But I feel it.  Do you come to forget?”

“Yes.”

“Ah!” softly exclaimed Cameron.  Always he seemed to have known that.  He said no more.  He watched the old man rise and begin his nightly pace to and fro, up and down.  With slow, soft tread, forward and back, tirelessly and ceaselessly, he paced that beat.  He did not look up at the stars or follow the radiant track of the moon along the canyon ramparts.  He hung his head.  He was lost in another world.  It was a world which the lonely desert made real.  He looked a dark, sad, plodding figure, and somehow impressed Cameron with the helplessness of men.

Cameron grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of the fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his passion-driven soul.  He had come into the desert to remember a woman.  She appeared to him then as she had looked when first she entered his life—­a golden-haired girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and beautiful.  He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse knocked at his heart.  He rose and climbed out of the canyon and to the top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro and looked down into the weird and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the cold, blue horizon.  The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene.  The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine.  The desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting.  It spoke to Cameron.  It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul.  In that wild solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly.  They had shone upon a desert that might once have been alive and was now dead, and might again throb with life, only to die.  It was a terrible ordeal for him to stand along and realize that he was only a man facing eternity.  But that was what gave him strength to endure.  Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven.  In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined to be phantoms of peace.

He returned to camp and sought his comrade.

“I reckon we’re two of a kind,” he said.  “It was a woman who drove me into the desert.  But I come to remember.  The desert’s the only place I can do that.”

“Was she your wife?” asked the elder man.

“No.”

A long silence ensued.  A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering heat.  The campfire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.